


almost

by silverkatana



Category: Super Junior
Genre: Angst, I'm Sorry, M/M, lapslock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 08:06:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19146940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverkatana/pseuds/silverkatana
Summary: he turns to look at heechul, and his voice cracks from the sheer emotion that hisses through it, a discordant mesh of rage, brokenness, sorrow, and everything in between. “we almost made it.”





	almost

(one.)

“i love you,” jungsoo says.

heechul leans against the grass, trailing his hands over the soft surface. “the stars are pretty,” he replies, eyes fixed on the night sky, “you don’t really get the chance to see them in seoul, do you?”

silence. and then, more desperately, helplessly, than before, “i love you.”

this time, heechul turns his eyes away from the skies painted navy and fixes them on jungsoo instead - his tousled hair, messy from lying on the grass, his eyes holding so much hopeless hope, his hands clenching into fists as if trying to hold on to something no longer there. and then his gaze drops, fixes itself on the grass instead, as though he can’t bear to face jungsoo. 

“i know,” he responds.

“then why?” jungsoo breathes out, turning his head against the grass so his eyes bore holes into heechul’s cheek. “why not?”

“we can’t,” comes heechul’s flat response, “we can’t.”

silence befalls them again, and jungsoo can hear his heartbeat shuddering in his throat, racing and waiting, patient and agitated as he reaches out for heechul’s hand. 

heechul doesn’t protest, doesn’t move away as jungsoo’s fingers intertwine with his own, instead looking straight at jungsoo and whispering, “your face is so red i can see it even in the dark.”

“shut up,” jungsoo rasps back, “before i fall in love with you even more.”

heechul chuckles at that. “you can’t help a human heart, jungsoo.”

bitterness billows in jungsoo’s throat like rising vapour, and he struggles to keep his voice steady as he mutters out stubbornly, “you can help mine.”

and in a foolish display of unfounded hope, he looks at heechul, waiting ever-patiently in the silence underneath the stars.

then heechul lets out a breath, and in the nothing that he says lies everything he could have said. and jungsoo’s heartbeat slows, matching the soft blinking pulse of the stars in the night sky, and his throat burns as he turns his head to watch them, lying next to heechul, so many things unsaid but having nothing left to be said.

“if the world didn’t work like this,” jungsoo wonders aloud, more to himself than to anyone else, but he knows heechul’s listening anyway, “would we have kissed under the stars?”

and in heechul’s silence, in the tightening of his jaw, in the way the moonlight falls out of his eyes, jungsoo finds his answer.

_ to think of all the things we could’ve been _ , jungsoo’s heart hurts, worse than any physical infliction of pain that could ever occur to him,  _ it’s a cruel thing. _

 

* * *

 

(two.)

in the blinding lights, in the deafening screams, jungsoo lets his mind rest a little too long on heechul. this time he’s different, wrapped not in subtle moonlight but in flashing colours and the charisma that comes with stepping foot on stage. 

still beautiful, jungsoo thinks to himself as he moves through practised dance routines, still worth the world.

he dances around heechul, their shoulders brushing just slightly, and the fans cheer louder. it leaves a sour taste in his mouth.  _ stop cheering for an illusion _ , his mind whispers, and as he moves past heechul again, he lets himself wonder,  _ can’t we be more than just half-confessions and silent rejections? _

“do you ever think of me?” he blurts aloud after the concert ends, backstage, and heechul pauses halfway through pulling his stage clothes over his head.

“i see you nearly every day at work,” he responds mildly, “it’s hard not to.”

jungsoo forgets, sometimes, how frustrating heechul can be when he wants to be. “not that way.” heechul raises an eyebrow, and he feels like hitting the damned man, because he’s certain that heechul knows exactly what he’s talking about. “the way i think about you.”

“i thought we agreed we wouldn’t discuss this,” heechul says, and jungsoo knows exactly what he’s talking about; the night still burned into his memory, the night underneath the blinking stars filled with the sounds of his too-fast heartbeat and heechul’s moonlit gaze too-slow in meeting his own.

“if you remember, we didn’t agree on anything,” jungsoo retorts, “you were silent for ninety-percent of it.”

“oh.” heechul continues to change, and jungsoo feels a sense of bittersweet frustration swelling in him. the same frustrating heechul, and yet the same heechul he fell in love with so many years ago.

jungsoo holds his bottom lip between his teeth, exhales nice and long, and then mutters out, “i deserved a better goodbye.”

“i know,” heechul says at last, sitting on the grey sofa and meeting jungsoo’s gaze with a pained expression of his own, “you deserved a lot more.”

“then why didn’t you give it to me?” jungsoo murmurs.

“you deserve more,” heechul replies, fast but soft, and as his hand falls onto the sofa and his eyes stray away, it’s clear that he no longer wants to continue discussing the topic.

_ but,  _ jungsoo’s heart whispers, _ you were the only one that ever made sense. _

 

* * *

 

(three.)

“you’re an asshole,” jungsoo says out of the blue, seven-fourteen in the evening as heechul steps out into the open.

“you called me out in the middle of winter to tell me that?” heechul queries, shivering slightly despite his heavy brown coat, watching his breath billow out in front of him. “and for the record, i think i’ve realised that a while ago.”

“remember this place?” jungsoo chooses to ignore the last part that heechul said, instead gesturing vaguely to the landscape. it looks plain and unremarkable, covered in a thin layer of frost, all signs of life under the frozen surfaces barely recognisable.

heechul’s quiet for a long time, and for a brief moment jungsoo wonders if he’s actually forgotten. then he says, “the stars here are still as bright as ever”, and jungsoo feels like he’s been set aflame again, his heart thundering in places where it’s not supposed to be at, his mind suddenly clouded from resurfacing memories he’s kept buried in his mind’s depths. 

“you know,” jungsoo rasps out, throat raw and tongue bitter, “we could have been so much more than what you let us be.”

heechul looks directly at him now, moonlight falling like crystal dust into his eyes, and responds simply. “i know.”

“you know,” jungsoo draws in a breath, sharp and angry and broken all at once, “i’m still so hopelessly in love with you, of everything you were and everything you are and everything you could’ve been? you know i’ve been chasing your echoes for years on end, running after your shadows and trying to hold onto them even though i’ve known all this time that you’d always be out of grasp?”

heechul blows out through his mouth, forming a cloud of visible breath before both of them. “i know.”

“you know,” jungsoo pulls his coat tighter around his shoulders, yet it does nothing to help the biting cold that encases his skin, “it’s still going to be you even if you’re just a faded echo, because you’re the only one who’s ever made sense, because you’re the only one i’ve ever wanted and i don’t  _ want _ anyone better? you know there could never be anyone better than you, you know i don’t deserve better than you, because you’re already the fucking world? don’t you know?”

heechul’s thumb is on his cheek, wiping away the tears. “it’s cold out,” he says by way of explanation as he finishes wiping the tears away, eyebrows furrowed as he examines jungsoo’s weary, broken expression. “i know.” he hesitates. “but you’re wrong on one count. i’m pretty sure you do deserve more than me, an asshole who makes you cry in the middle of winter.”

“i don’t care what i deserve, if i deserve anything at all,” jungsoo mutters flatly, “i’ve only ever wanted you all these years.”

heechul sighs, a long, low exclamation, eyes rounded with sympathy, and yet his fingers, smooth against jungsoo’s skin, seem tinged with poison. cruel, painful, a harsh reminder of what they might’ve been. “i know, jungsoo. i know. it’s just-”

“it’s just we can’t?” jungsoo bites out roughly, “it’s just me alone underneath the stars when it should’ve been the two of us? do you know how many nights i’ve wandered underneath the moonlight in my loneliness wondering if you ever thought about me? i’ve always wanted to lie with you and count the stars and maybe fall asleep next to you, maybe hold your hand, make memories with you that i’ll think of when i’m at my lowest that’ll bring me back to life, but-” he takes a shuddering breath, “- i guess that’s impossible, isn’t it?”

“i know,” heechul says. “that you wanted all these things.” another pause. “and i’m sorry i couldn’t give it to you.”

“how am i supposed to feel about this,” jungsoo whispers, and his throat tightens, but he refuses to cry. not again. not here, not in front of him. not again. “what am i supposed to do?”

it’s a tremendously heart-wrenching thing to be standing under the same sky as someone, looking at the same stars, and then realising that to you, they were more than all the galaxies combined, and to them, you were just a dot in the sky, fading, ephemeral, untouched. alone.

heechul doesn’t reply, so he continues to speak, biting back the hot tears that threaten to course through his words. “you know, that night,” he glances up at the stars, wondering if they were the same stars as they saw so many nights ago, “we almost kissed under the stars. we almost fell in love.”

he turns to look at heechul, and his voice cracks from the sheer emotion that hisses through it, a discordant mesh of rage, brokenness, sorrow, and everything in between. “we almost made it.”

“i know,” heechul replies, and he really must have been made out of galaxies combined, because as the tears began to slide down his cheeks in the fading moonlight, jungsoo could have sworn that they caught the light of a million stars.

**Author's Note:**

> wow it's been a while since i've written teukchul djbdfhs i hope you all enjoyed! (+i'm sorry, but not really, for the angst)


End file.
